Belief is like a red helium balloon. You can't bear to let go of it. But letting go is easy, and once you do it floats away and you wonder why you ever held it.
Work, politics, race, religion... try it with ever larger balloons.
The world changes, beliefs don't. They deflate.

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This book is about how to run services, in any organisation, in any industry. It describes the basics, the core stuff, in realistic pragmatic terms. And it is pragmatically brief - we kept it to 50 paperback pages.

Song for Stevie

A transcript of a recent performance by the famous and fragrant folk music performer Rambling Kid Realitsm, of his popular number "Home on the Range":

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, saddle-down down in your seats now and share with me this sad ditty about a broken-hearted compu-geek, lost in the bowels of an office building, chilled to the bone amongst cheerless racks of servers, locked into the server room. He pines for the open range of his home WAN with a LAN in every room and wireless to the skies, where he can run barefoot through the root passwords and administrator privileges, free to trash and crash and rebuild on his lordly whim, king of his domains. Oppressed by evil managers who cut down his privileges and block his passwords, he weeps at the pain their soulless quest for reliability brings upon him, and slumped behind the storage array he sings this sad lament....

Oh give me a home where the VMs roam
and the techs and administrators play!
Where seldom is heard a change management word
and the skies are cloudy all day!

How often at night in the cubicles bright
With the light of the monitors dual
Have I sat there amazed and asked as I gazed
If their glory exceeds that of jewels

Home, home on the range
Where the techs and administrators play!
Where seldom is heard an I-T-I-L word
and the skies are cloudy all day!

Then give me a LAN where the striped-RAID SAN
Flows leisurely in data streams
Where the virtual machine goes gliding unseen
Like a maid in a Warcraft dream

Oh I would not exchange my old home on the range
Where the techs and administrators play!
Where never is heard a procedural word
and the skies are cloudy all day!

But of course his dreams are ended by the evil Lord ITIL, and he passes his days toiling over procedures not of his making, his creativity crushed by repeatability, his god-like powers of system restoration untested in the dreadful sameness of 4-nines availability. One day the system-geeks shall be set free and bright will shine their iPads as they roam the streets no longer chained by employment, free to network amongst themselves in endless days of leisure.